The three stories told in Luke 15 about something or someone that is lost and then found are not about us, were not addressed to us, were not written for us. They are certainly not vehicles of a universal evangelistic message about lost sinners who need to be saved by the atoning death of Jesus and reconciled to God. They were told by Jesus to one section of first century Jewish society to explain why he hung out with another section of first century Jewish society:

Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes grumbled, saying, “This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So he told them this parable… (Lk. 15:1–3)

…and then another one, and then another one—all to the same effect. They are not free-floating fables, like Aesop’s timeless story of the hare and the tortoise. They should not really be subjected to vitrification in our churches. They belong somewhere, sometime. They have a context. They are rooted in history.

I have to prepare some material about discipleship for a small leaders’ retreat. The approach I want to take is to frame discipleship narrative-historically. No surprises there. One way to do this is to take a very practical letter with strong discipleship content, such as 1 Corinthians, and try to show how the paraenetic material relating to disunity, sexual immorality, lawsuits, celibacy and marriage, food offered to idols, spiritual gifts, men and women, etc., is controlled by an overarching eschatological narrative. It is not generalised ethical-spiritual teaching; it is narratively contextualised; and we are likely to misunderstand Paul if we drive a wedge between the practical teaching about how to live and be church and the eschatological frame. By the same token, I will argue—but not here—that we cannot do discipleship properly today if we do not take into account our own unique narrative-historical context.

The basic thesis of Greg Beale’s A New Testament Biblical Theology is i) that the Old Testament gives us the story of how God “progressively reestablishes his new-creational kingdom out of chaos”; and ii) that this storyline is transformed in the New Testament inasmuch as Jesus’ life, death and resurrection have “launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-not yet new-creational reign” (16, italics removed, statements abbreviated, other caveats may apply).

In short, he aims to develop a more or less comprehensive biblical theology controlled by a story oriented towards the “goal of new-creational kingship” (179). Note the merging of “new creation” and “kingdom”—I’ll come back to that.

I argued a few weeks back that the “son of man” figure in Daniel 7:13-14 is not an individual messiah or an angel or divine hypostasis (i.e., a manifestation of some aspect of the godhead) but symbolically represents that part of Israel which remained faithful to the covenant, at great cost, during the crisis provoked by Antiochus IV Epiphanes’ brutal attempt to eradicate Jewish religion.

Craig has objected, however, that the reference to “one like a son of man” is unique, that he is clearly a “singular individual”, and that I have not “provided a persuasive argument to overcome this”. He further maintains that “saints of the Most High” defines an expansive category that includes not only the “current Jewish saints” but everyone who would be part of God’s kingdom—“in other words the church of God of people of all nations”. Finally he asks whether my novel “historical interpretive schema” does not in fact oblige me to argue that Daniel’s prophecy was not fulfilled by Jesus. I want to address these criticisms.

The scribes claim that Jesus casts out demons by the prince of demons, and Jesus says that’s a stupid accusation to make because it would mean that Satan is fighting against himself. He then puts to them a little parable, the point of which presumably is that he is able to cast out evil spirits because the strong man has been bound:

But no one can enter a strong man’s (ischurou) house and plunder his goods, unless he first binds the strong man. Then indeed he may plunder his house. (Mk. 3:27; cf. Matt. 12:29)

In a series of talks at the Communitas International (formerly known as Christian Associates) staff conference in Budapest recently Greg Boyd argued 1) that American Christianity has been compromised and corrupted by its close association with state and especially military power; 2) that European Christendom was a disastrous departure from the authentic faith of the early church and should never have been allowed to happen; and 3) that the cross should be determinative for our reading of scripture and our understanding of God. Greg has a big new book coming out next year, I gather, with the title The Crucifixion of the Warrior God, which just about sums up the whole thesis.

What is the mission of the church? Conservatives will say that the mission of the church, at core, is to save people. Other activities, no matter how laudable, are secondary to this task because there is nothing more important than a person’s eternal destiny. More progressive types will say that the mission of the church is to serve people. That’s partly because people don’t want to be saved any more, but there’s also a gratifying ethical-political edge to it. It’s a way of getting some traction in the world.

Oversimplifying admittedly, I suggest that both the conservatives and the progressives have got it wrong. Saving people and serving people are understandable responses to the crisis of credibility that the church in the secular West faces. But they lack a sense of narrative context and for that reason miss the point.